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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Lynde Dix (April 4, 1802 %u2013 July 17, 1887) was an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. In 1840-41, Dix conducted a statewide investigation of how her home state of Massachusetts cared for the insane poor. -
Clara Barton
In April 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. She was given a pass by General William Hammond to ride in army ambulances [to] provide comfort to the soldiers and nurse them back to health and lobbied the U.S. Army bureaucracy, at first without success, to bring her own medical supplies to the battlefields. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Bickerdyke became the best known, most colorful, and probably most resourceful Civil War nurse. By the end of the war, 1865, with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields including the Battle of Shiloh and Sherman's March to the Sea. -
Linda Richards
By 1874 Linda was ready to take over the floundering Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse training programs in the country. -
Lavinia Dock
After serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, Lavinia Dock compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890). She played a major role as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing and she linked American nurses' goals to similar efforts in England. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian D. Wald was a practical idealist who worked to create a more just society, and in 1895, Wald moved to 265 Henry Street and founded the renowned Henry Street Settlement House Her goal was to ensure that women and children, immigrants and the poor, and members of all ethnic and religious groups would realize America%u2019s promise of %u201Clife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.%u201D -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1896, Isabel Adams Hampton Robb (1860-1910), who served as president of both the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, which eventually became the National League for Nursing, and the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, which became the American Nurses Association.She abolished the practice of having student nurses do private duty nursing, broadened the curriculum and established affiliations with other hospitals. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original members of a predominately white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (later known as the American Nurses Association or ANA) and in 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1907, she joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing with outstanding contributions to nursing and nursing education. Nutting headed the Department of Nursing and Health at the college from 1910 until she retired in 1925. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1916 (1917 according to some sources), Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the United States, and the following year, she was sent to the workhouse for "creating a public nuisance." Her many arrests and prosecutions, and the resulting outcries, helped lead to changes in laws giving doctors the right to give birth control advice (and later, birth control devices) to patients. -
Annie Goodrich
Goodrich, a graduate of the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1915 to 1918. In 1924 became dean of, the first nursing program at Yale University, and was responsible for developing the program into the Yale Graduate School of Nursing ten years later. -
Mary Breckinridge
In May of 1925, Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse who started the Frontier Nursing Service in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, in order to provide health care topoor people who lived in remote mountain settlements. Breckinridge also founded the first school in America that trained and certified midwifes. -
Ida V. Moffett
Ida dedicated her life to providing quality care and creating standardized nursing education. A pioneer in setting standards for healthcare, she became the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in closing substandard nursing schools, in organizing hospital peer groups, in licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nurses. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership. This is a testimonial to the courage and foresight of this nursing leader. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau, Ed.D (September 1, 1909, Reading, Pennsylvania %u2013 17 March 1999) was a nursing theorist whose seminal work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing was published in 1952, and she emphasized the nurse-client relationship as the foundation of nursing practice. Her research and emphasis on the nurse-client relationships was seen by many as revolutionary, and she form an interpersonal model emphasizing the need for a partnership between nurse and client. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem (1914- 22.06.2007), born in Baltimore, Maryland, was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory, which states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. In 1959, she first published her theory in %u201CGuides for Developing Curricula for the Education of Practical Nurses%u201D. -
Martha Rogers
In about 1963, Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery" She categorized nursing activities into 14 components, based on human needs, and described the nurse's role as substitutive (doing for the person), supplementary (helping the person), or complementary (working with the person), with the goal of helping the person become as independent as possible. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger (13 July 1925 in Sutton, U.S.) is a pioneering nursing theorist, and her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care. Most notably, she was the founder of transcultural nursing, a program that she created at the School in 1974 and developed the concept of transcultural nursing, bringing the role of cultural factors in nursing practice into the discussion of how to best attend to those in need of nursing care. -
Jean Watson
The foundation of Jean Watson%u2019s theory of nursing was published in 1979 in nursing: %u201CThe philosophy and science of caring%u201D and she believes that the main focus in nursing is on carative factors. She believes that for nurses to develop humanistic philosophies and value system, a strong liberal arts background is necessary.
